Mara R. Wade is professor emerita of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is the immediate past president of the Renaissance Society of America. She earned the Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, under the supervision of Professor Gerhard Dünnhaupt. Her research focuses on emblems, digital humanities, court studies of Germany and Scandinavia, gender studies, and German literature and the arts in the early modern period. She is an associate editor of Emblematica: Essays in Word and Image, having served until January 2023 as Editor in Chief. She is is the PI for Emblematica Online. She was a Getty Scholar 2018-2019 and a Newberry Library fellow 2016-2017; she holds a senior research prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She was also awarded the prize for excellence in undergraduate teaching from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Illinois.